Here today, gone tomorrow

Rupert Christiansen on a cabinet of curiosities, from extinct Caspian tigers to a lost silent movie masterpiece

‘TAN INVENTORY OF LOSSES by Judith Schalansky, tr Jackie Smith 256pp, MacLehose, £20, ebook £13.99

he art of losing isn’t hard to master,” claimed the American poet Elizabeth Bishop in a wry villanelle. Losing not in contrast to winning, that is, but in the melancholy tendency of valued things from car keys to loved ones to vanish or disintegrate, sometimes through natural process, sometimes through neglect or accident, sometimes through wilful human agency. In this odd but engaging book, beautifully illustrated with evocative images, Judith Schalansky explores varieties of this universally experienced tragedy.

An Inventory of Losses presents a dozen disconnected essays on forgotten or discarded phenomena, prefaced by some philosophical lucubration that rambles through vatic thoughts about death and memory, the ephemeral and the eternal, that can descend to the vacuously portentous (“anyone who wants to control the future must obliterate the past”) and even the downright banal (do we really need to be told that “although nothing lasts forever, some things do endure longer than others”?). But there is much to intrigue the reader too, including a sobering list of recent culturally significant losses – the Syrian city of Palmyra and the only known sample of metallic hydrogen among them – alongside some unexpected findings – strands of George Washington’s hair, for instance, or a planet in a distant constellation with roughly the same climatic situation as our own.

Those examples suggest the range of Schalansky’s sensibility. Born in 1980 in East Germany, she writes in the free-associating meditative tradition of her compatriot W G Sebald. Like him she is fascinated by the arcane, the eccentric and the peripheral, as she wanders mentally outside the mainstream (her most successful book, published in 2010, was called Atlas of Remote Islands) and leaves ambiguities and loose ends unresolved. The world as she interprets it is a series of conundrums and questions, to be addressed opaquely and obliquely – so this is not a book for fans of the obvious, and even the more open-minded may find its refusal to come clean frustrating, despite a translation by Jackie Smith of elegance, clarity and fluency.

Yet here is food for thought and reverie. Schalansky prefaces each essay with an italicised page of fact, which she uses as a springboard for her imagination. Thus the People’s Palace in East Berlin, a ghastly Communist behemoth in glass and concrete finally demolished in 2008 because of its asbestos content, makes only an incidental appearance in a story about the tribulations of domestic life during the Honecker era and a chapter nominally devoted to the antiquarian Otto von Guericke’s claim to have found a skeleton of a unicorn turns into an account of strange sights encountered by Schalansky as she toys with the idea of writing a book about monsters while walking alone through the Valais Alps.

There are several interior monologues. One is devoted to Gottfried Kinau, a 19th-century topographer who made meticulous maps, now vanished, of the craters of the moon; another is announced as the tale of the director

F W Murnau’s lost silent film inspired by Gainsborough’s painting The Blue Boy, only to swerve into a trip inside the head of Greta Garbo during the 1950s.

Retired from the cinema and a confirmed recluse, Garbo pounds the streets of Manhattan on her solitary daily constitutional walk, spitting with cynical disillusion and “even tired of being tired” of her celebrity. The link between her and Murnau is something that Schalansky doesn’t explain: I had to do my own research to discover that Garbo revered and possibly loved Murnau (a closeted homosexual, who died in 1931) and commissioned a death mask of him

The paradise atoll of Tuanaki seems to have been consumed in a marine earthquake

THE SONG OF SIMON DE MONTFORT by Sophie Ambler 368pp, Picador, £10.99

From 1264 to 1265, Henry III was imprisoned while England was ruled by a revolutionary council led by Simon de Montfort, a man of “monumental audacity and charisma” who had seduced the king’s sister. Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, this biography captures his spirit.